Microsoft announce AI Copilot for PC and Xbox games, shoving AI into Minecraft

thesixthaxis.com:

Microsoft has presented their next generation AI enhanced PC’s and Surface tablets, and along with it the reveal that their AI Copilot software will soon be embedded in PC and Xbox games. The first will be Minecraft and you can see it in action in the short video below.

https://x.com/charlieINTEL/status/1792630909151133768

Microsoft has been aggressively pursuing AI over the past couple of years, investing billions into OpenAI, adding it to their Bing search engine and trying to find ways to apply it to Windows, Office and now Xbox gaming.

As you can see form the Minecraft demo, the player can simply use their own voice to ask for help within the game and Copilot will tell them exactly what they need to do with natural language interactions. In this instance, Copilot can be asked for a crafting recipe and the AI will check you have everything needed in your inventory, guide you through collecting anything else you need, and take you step-by-step through the process of crafting a sword.

it’s a clever demo that will send a shiver down the spine of gaming sites that rely on guides to be profitable, but there’s a lot of question marks for how this will actually work. Microsoft is putting an emphasis on privacy, which will mean that Copilot tools will try to run locally before polling the cloud, and that will require dedicated hardware with new chips featuring an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) – the demos used PCs with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite chips featuring a hefty built-in NPU.

There’s also other things to overcome. For an AI to be useful, it also needs to be all-knowing and always available. While AIs can analyse what they see on screen, that will be a much more intensive process than having APIs and direct hooks into the backend of a game – otherwise they can’t really know what’s in your full inventory, where you are on the world map you are, what the quest steps are or anything else that they need. Game developers and engine developers will probably need to put